


Harry Potter One shots

by BlackandGrey



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Slash, deep
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-03-28 07:34:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13899348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackandGrey/pseuds/BlackandGrey
Summary: From Harry to Voldemort himself, JK Rowling's characters are each etched with layers of detail. This series of works will look into the pasts, pains and memories of different characters. :)





	1. In the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Intimate and distant, every relationship must come to an end one way or another.

**In the Dark- Harry Potter**

  Death has always seemed to me an obscure and abstract concept, a daunting and lonely darkness following us all in shadows and echo traces left behind our every footstep. But, in all honesty, I have never spared much time to ponder the philosophy of demise, although it has tailed me for a lifetime, seeming to reside around every corner, resting feather light on the soul of each person I love, turning heavy as stone at the crucial moment and coming to weigh opaque and cold on one age-worn shoulder. I never cry, tears frozen into glassy shards that are not cold but burn and scorch my every fibre. Thinking too much has never been good, driving me to murky corners of my mind that are altogether best left untouched and alien. And anyway, I have never seemed to have much time to spend contemplating the unchangeable, rationalising the irrational with dark eternity lurking forever only a footstep behind me. Nevertheless recently, I have had more time to reflect, and plenty more reason to.

  I have always strayed far from the shadows and fought every fleeting impulse that drew me towards them, but now with almost nothing left standing between me and toxic oblivion, the longings are not so fleeting and they call to me every night in pale skin and blond hair and whispered desire.

  I have been seeing Draco Malfoy for almost a year now, and I still don’t know how it started. I know even less of how and why it continues; all I do know is that I am inexplicably bound in inky threads to him and every time teeth meet lip I am lost and desperate. I am constantly trapped in a web of answered questions begging relief, tearing through skin and bone, penetrating muscle and organ: _Why can’t I stop? What is happening to me? Why does everyone leave me?_ Yet the only liberation I find is of shared, heated breathes and grazing nails.

  Each time it is the same; he finds me or occasionally I find him and then we both discover ourselves breaking slowly apart in a bed, a disused classroom, the astronomy tower. My mind is finally startlingly clear, lucid as polished glass, setting me free from the pain and guilt and hunger that constantly make battlefield of my mind. The clarity bathes me in simplicity for a little while, until the roaring whispers of discontent consume me once more and the world seems dimmer and leaden in contrast. And each day he produces a cigarette and I gaze on in unfathomable fascination as he inhales deep lungfuls of lethal smoke. I linger motionless on the bed and gaze, slack-jawed at the smouldering end of Draco’s cigarette, trailing smoky tongues and death in grey curls that lick against my skin and stain black on pale lips. Again and again, the loop continues, I watch and he exhales spectral smoke the colour of his eyes, pupils pirouetting around mine yet never quite meeting, an ageless dance of no conclusion.

  Often, I am captivated by his lips, ashen yet seamless- sculpted and soft forming a perfect “o” while slowly filling the room with his irresistible poison. Other times, I permit my eyes to drift, down the narrow, curving line of his neck, the shadowed hollow of his throat and past the jutting bone of his shoulder, thinly veiled in white satin skin, all the way down his arms, muscles pulled taut each time his raises his hand to take another drag. My gaze comes to rest on his forearm, just above his wrist on the winding tattoo, snaking around his arm like a black handcuff separating the two of us in an irremovable stain, discolouring his unblemished skin and branding him. It is an undying and optical reminder that he has already been claimed. The smell of smoke and his breathe is the only barrier left between transparency and opaque, wandering thought.

  Yet everything must come to an end and when it has finally burnt down to his fingers, he stubs out the glowing embers against the bedpost or stamps them on the floor into sifting ash the colour of coal. I stare at the dead residue as he puts his robes back on, glowing red balanced between thin fingers still imprinted in vibrant flashes on my eyes, but I drag them reluctantly away as he leaves and this is the only time our eyes meet. A silent yet deafeningly lurid goodbye shared beneath long, pale lashes and silver irises interrupted only by widening sockets telling of unspoken oaths to secrecy and promise of more. Every time he leaves I feel the tide going out and every time he leaves I remain for hours, waiting for a return he never makes, imaging the next time I will be intercepted.

  This is what I remember on a constant coil of retention as we separate once again, savouring in the sudden vivacity of my world yet he stands and there is no cigarette. He looks down at me, still sitting against the tower wall and his stare suddenly shifts and my eyes widen as he lets me look deep into his silvery gaze, laced with longing and fear and regret. The vulnerability disappears almost as soon as it comes to be and I am left with only confusion grazing against my lungs and disbelief colouring my eyes to know that I didn’t imagine it as he pulls on his robes and strides from the room, not sparing me another glance.

  _There was no cigarette_. This is the only thought that devours my mind as I follow minutes later. It is the only thought that pounds with every heartbeat as I am called to Dumbledore’s office the next day. It is the only thought that slowly consumes me and stains each piece of me in red and smoky grey as my professor falls from the tower that I had filled with primal want and desperation mere hours before.

 _There was no cigarette_. He stands, wand extended, blind to my presence yet his eyes are wide and pale and coloured with my dreams. The air darkens, crimson bleeding across the sky as the old man falls. The sunset is fitting, beautiful and so transient as beautiful things often are. Draco lowers his arm as the sun dies, mark concealed by robes but presence so bright in my mind that it must be burning hotter that I imagine the sun.

  _There was no cigarette_. My brain refuses to be shut out and my eyes burn hot as that slowly drifting smoke. He leaves, still not seeing me and just like that, I am shadow. Tears, blood and smoke in the dark.


	2. Riddle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Riddle ponders the nature of dreams and their lasting, violent impacts.

**Riddle**

  Dreams have been defined throughout ages of times past in a myriad of ways, but I have found that every description is, in truth, the same: _A series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring a person’s mind. A cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal. An unrealistic or self-deluding fantasy._ Day-dreams, hallucinations, even nightmares have been characterized by their falsity drawn of deepest desires and fears, buried deep within our minds beneath inexorable layers of logic and reason and rationality; in the subconscious- the liar of the brain, twisting reality to the form we want it, seeing ourselves the way we wish we were. Dreams are built of fantasy, ideas and hopes set free to roam and consume us only when the mind drifts and is able to give way to its darkest yearnings, long since forgotten and brushed off as only fiction.

  But I have never heard anyone talk about the hidden veracity of dreams. More specifically, the veracity of _my_ dreams. As I mentioned before, dreams are stitched not only of illogicality but of lust and want and need- now tell me: what is more logical, what is more honest than opening ourselves to our deepest desires? Sifting through and accepting what we find, finally knowing ourselves. I believe that this is the most truthful thing of all.

  But my dreams speak truth in other ways, in flashes of smeared grey and red, blending past and present into unfathomable blurs. Each night I lay staring at the walls, serpent green melting into shadow before my very eyes and tormenting me with bygone and needless pain. My followers (because can I really count among them a single “friend”?) say that nightmares are for infants, but no child would ever dream the things that I dream. Days drift and I am lost in my mind, fleeting retention of startling clarity flickering forever behind my eyelids of unnamed horrors both experienced and yet to be experienced. Sometimes I wonder, if I could banish these thoughts forever, would I? And the answer I search for is an inexplicable no.

  In my dreams I scream, but when I wake I am silent.

  Sometimes one of my more audacious “friends” will try to talk to me, invade my deep layers of psychology in an attempt to truly understand who I “really am”. Maybe it’s because my mother died that I am quick to anger. Maybe it’s because I was raised in an orphanage that I feel nothing for other’s suffering. Maybe it’s because I was found with muggles that I speak the term “mudblood”.

  Maybe it’s because of these things that after every interrogation, I torture you again and again in my sleep watching you bleed but never allowed to reach silent serenity, before I wake with wet eyes and a barren hunger that only my night-time expressions seem to satisfy. I’ve been told that on the surface I am cold. Years of learned manipulation and carefully constructed indifference concealing the fact that underneath I am blazing hot. Resentment and anger and most of all hate blistering just below my skin, scorching my intestines, blackening my heart to softly glowing embers. Pieces of me escape in flashes of violent rage that disappear almost as quickly as they come to be and I am poised, composed, and icy once more. Vaguely I wonder what is wrong with my brain, but then I turn to wonder what is wrong with this world because all I have seen in my brief stay on Earth is shadow and weakness. I have been weak, mocked and tormented, but in the end it was I who held the power and relished in every whimper extracted from rosy, infantile lips. And it was you who were weak beneath blackened glare and fingertips. Everything has become twisted and while my mind remains clear, my subconscious lacks such clarity and I wander between fear and desire until the two are no longer distinguishable and my world is coloured a stunning grey.

  In my dreams I am not human, and I bathe in the blood of infants.

  This is where my philosophy comes in, and dream supersedes reality. I have spent my time at Hogwarts well, I have learnt of magic, how to use it for my own advances. I have discerned chambers of divine, haunting secrets watching blood run with an intimate kind of fascination. I have attested my beliefs once and for all and put to rest the knowledge running through my core. I know I am exceptional. Why do I have to hide it? Muggles ought to cower in dread from us, not the other way around and wizard-kind has existed too long in fearful sanctuary. Benign and jaded.

  It draws out emotions long since buried behind stone walls of shame and hurt and I will not be weak again.

  In my dreams I fly above a crowd of people with no faces.

  And so, here we sit, my cronies departed to allow my favourite teacher and I time to discuss your latest homework assignment. The table stretches a furnished glass between us, lucid as my voice, seducing you with promise of the admiration you so willingly give to others yet ache to receive in return. And so, you give in, apprehension lacing your expression into quiet uncertainty, but my eyes reflect your fear and you are severed by the curve of my lips.

  “Horcruxes” I ask and you oh so willingly oblige.

  Now my head is filled with anticipation and dark desire flooding through my nerves and winding around my every bone, caressing every organ. Every fibre of my being is taut and tensed and for the first time in my life, future is all I see stretching miles before me; grandiose and elegant. I can captivate with a single lilt, seduce with a dark-eyed glance and I baptise my disciples one by one in agony and atonement, until they are branded irretrievably as mine, their minds and arms tattooed. By the time I leave this school, we will be indestructible.

  Plans unfold, starting with a girl. I will never forget her wide, translucent eyes, reflecting green of the locket around her neck and the honeyed breath that escapes her ruby lips for the final time. I hold her in my arms as she slips into nothingness, I am irresistible poison running through her veins. Then comes the pain- it sends shudders through me and wracks my entire body. It spirals cracks through my very core, but my soul is torn and I am one step closer.

  In my dreams I paint in the red finality I will never know.

  I no longer have to manipulate, and my dexterity is second only to my power. I am within fingers grasp of the ambition I’ve seen only countless times just never with my eyes. But still, I dream and now my visions have evolved into darkness and light and emotion I left behind long ago. I have made the world fear me and now even shadows scatter at my approach, yet they leave behind them trails of dusty light; ageless and unceasing and no matter how much authority I edict, the flickers do not waver. Golden shards penetrate the fragmented piece of myself I permit to remain, staining my darkness in piercing light. Enduring years unchanging and unyielding does nothing to soften the pale-edged unease clawing at my subconscious, and the solitude is searing. In attaining my greatest longing, I have also realised my greatest fear and I am left an immortal shadow.

  In my dreams I am trapped in a photograph, the sun slowly bleeding away the colour.


	3. Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Human and aloof, Draco Malfoy finds himself torn between love and duty.

**Alive- Draco Malfoy**

  My father has told me that intimacy is the most deadly form of addiction. I’m not entirely sure how accurate this is and he’s never given the most accommodating advice but I do know that he means well. I’ve heard many things about my father over the years- that he’s cruel, a liar, selfish. And maybe they’re right, but from my observation, I’ve always thought he’s more misunderstood than evil. He’s not cruel, but devoted; a vessel of ruthlessness and love enough to oppose his enemies, law and own morality to protect what belongs to him. He’s not a liar, but a poet; unravelling and re-stitching events of the past from dull and meaningless into something beautiful and even if his version of events is tied more to the present than the past, who’s to say that his isn’t a more accurate version of reality? He’s not selfish, he’s afraid- for me, my mother, for the world he belongs to and I have often wondered why what is seen as strength in most is seen as only weakness in him: the willingness to survive.

  My father has often told me that intimacy is the most deadly form of addiction. I’m not entirely sure how accurate this is but I _am_ sure that he believed it. Everyone is made of a name not their own, everyone has their own unreadable truth. Few people were able to get close enough to my father to see beyond the icy shell he attires, but those that he has let in know that he is not as detached as he would lead them to believe. My mother for one, is one of the only people that knows his truth. When I was younger I was afraid of my father, I remember sitting in my mother’s lap and running my fingers through her silky hair, feeling her skin and asking how she could be so warm when he was so cold. She just laughed and tucked my hair behind my ears. “Your father isn’t cold, Draco” she told me “or even indifferent- he cares, deeply, too much for this world.” I didn’t understand what she meant at first but when his mark began to darken I touched his arm and it burned hotter than I imagine the sun and his tears were as warm as anybody else’s. I knew then that he was not filled with ice but flame. She also told me that loving my father is easy, but the hard part is making him let you. When he loves, he loves entirely and with every burning cell so that to lose you would be inconceivable. A loss of a piece of himself.

  But I don’t think she fully comprehended what I was asking. I have never doubted that my father loves me or even considered him indifferent although he’s never spoken the words and I know most would believe that he is incapable of love. What I didn’t grasp was why his passion and anger and fire were masked so completely when my mother wore hers like delicate jewellery, reflected in her eyes. As I’ve grown older, I have become more like him, I think and I am of the few that see the fear he wears like a funeral veil. It has covered him head to toe for so many years that it has penetrated the deepest recesses of his heart. Sometimes I look in his eyes and I see a clawing emptiness. I recognise it in myself and I know that it was planted long ago with ambition, darkness, the promise of power. I often wish that my mother was enough to fill him, but I have come to realise that probably nothing is.

  My father tells me that intimacy is the most deadly form of addiction. I’m still not entirely sure how true this is, but I’m finding myself more and more inclined to agree. I wonder what he would think if he knew how severely I had spurned his advice, even unintentionally. If he knew the ways I had chosen to seal that emptiness clawing inside my heart. If he knew that green eyes filled my ambition where there should be stars.

  I doubt that I’m the first to mistake intimacy for obsession but nevertheless I’m finding it increasingly difficult to draw the line between dependency and addiction. Dependent is defined as “contingent on or determined by”. When I reflect on my dependency, I characterise it for the effect it has on every action and decision I make. When I contemplate my addiction, I think about the desperation.

  I have been staring at Harry for too long today. But then again, I stare at him for too long every day, watching shadows steal across his face and sentiment colour his eyes; I could dissect each one for hours on end. I have become a slave to my own compulsion, each heart beat a spear of lightning counting down until the moment I must tear my eyes away. Often I half hope that he’ll catch me staring, that he’ll meet my eyes with his own and maybe smile like he understands. Sometimes I hope that his gaze will darken, that he’ll confront me, let me feel his fists against my skin and die beneath those scorching emeralds.

  He never does though, catch me I mean. If he happens to glance in my direction I look away and after years of practice I’ve become an expert.

  My father reminds me that intimacy is the most deadly form of addiction. I’ve been pondering his words for so long now that they’re starting to lose all meaning, like nursery rhymes or when you stare at the sun and everything seems to blur into nonexistence. In some ways we are exactly the same, my father and me, and in others total opposites. Take our childhoods for example, both raised in illusions of grandeur and then shunted into the shadows of true greatness. The only difference is that he walked willingly into the dark and I have been pulled alongside him. Then again, neither of us have ever been on the winning team and my days are starting to drift, blackening the colours of my mind. The light is starting to seem tainted, the darkness pure. After all, who knew emeralds could gleam so cruel? Who knew that humanity could pierce so deep? Who knew the light could burn so harsh? I accepted a long time ago that beautiful things can only be seen from afar, but that’s never stopped me from gazing into space, across a crowed hall or the distance of a dream. It’s never stopped me from longing for things I know I’ll never have… Friendship devoid of ambition, patience without expectation of a gain, sincerity without ransom. My footsteps are growing heavier each day I shoulder the weight of my father's legacy, every footprint tracing deeper marks. I have worn the mask for so long now that I've lost all comprehension of the life I could have led, of what I could have had, what I could have been. Never cracking, never faltering, playing my part until the bitter end. Maybe things could've been different, maybe I could've built my thrones from gold instead of silver, maybe if I had taken my own path, chosen to fight tooth and nail against destiny. Maybe, but what's the use in fighting just to be the smallest fraction closer, staring through an empty space strung with just a little less hostility. Maybes are pointless in the end. 

  My father used to say that intimacy is the most deadly form of addiction. Even as I stare into green pools laced with the kindest type of poison, his words still echo through my ears, tearing through flesh and shivering through my bones. All that's left is to carry on, cold and cruel and unharmed. Still my father's son, still a Malfoy, still alive.


	4. Humanity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dark detail of life and Lucius Malfoy

**Lucius Malfoy: Humanity**

  I was always taught to appreciate beautiful things, raised on the belief that prosperity is the counterpart of beauty and that money is the foundation for achievement of such assets. As such, I have turned my father’s considerable fortune into wealth beyond rationality. I have surrounded myself with splendour, built a tower for myself to survey the feeble with aversion metallic on my tongue. I have selected only the finest to have and to hold and have remained remote to the changing of tide, the various circles rising and falling around me, like spinning planets in orbit. I have wormed my way into the reverence of every authority until I was at last at the very top because I was also taught that power is the most beautiful thing of all.

  But all the riches in the world cannot afford it.

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the pain returns, jerking me from silent oblivion, burning white hot and livid against my arm, stretching out over my skin like a searing blade, rending my flesh apart. Ivory gears grind hideously as I struggle to lie still, lips clenched and silent so that I don’t wake her, so that I don’t shatter the cold pretence that can be maintained only in hours of shadow with my blistering, fiery fear. Black crackles like slipping sand as I heave the sensation back into the void because it is only at times like these, when the ceaseless torture alighting my nerves both simplifies and augments my mind that I am uncontained. It’s strange how extraordinary agony can bring with it such clarity and sentiment, tearing through my every resilient barricade and bringing forth such helplessness that I might suffocate in its magnitude, drowning out everything but defenceless servitude, bleeding and feverish.

  If nights are callous façade, days are sweltering certainty as each time the sun rises, glaring and crimson, I am forced to release any semblance of power I may have conjured. Shadows often slice through my aching thoughts, reminding me of the moment I willingly yielded, deferential and weak to him even as I convinced myself that kneeling offered power. Head bowed and conquered, it was only as he branded me irretrievably, only when I had surrendered everything I had to give- mind, body, soul that the gravity of my sacrifice was comprehended. I was proud then, full of twisted glory as he claimed me, named me his very best even as he scourged my nerves with blackened fingertips. I believed enough gold could buy me anything. I didn’t know then, but I do now.

  I know how pride and pain can thread themselves irretrievably together in a tangled web, weaved through shuddering flesh. I know each way a person can be broken, how agony can be made to transcend physicality, forging a fiercer, more caustic battle within one’s own mind. I know how sanity can tear you open, hot blood and organ assaulted by storm and how madness can be the only escape from the torture of your own actions- instructed but yours to bear all the same. I learnt the devastation that absolute power commands only by having my own ripped away, wandering between fear and desire until mine ran in perfect accord with his.

  Sometimes at night, while her silent breathing echoes in my ears, I break free and wonder if there was a way I could have avoided this, forsaken the master who has stolen so much of what could have been mine. If there is way she still could be spared. Maybe if she had chosen to love a man other than a monster that had already been claimed, a man other than one that was incapable of loving her with such feeling, maybe she could’ve been happy instead of loyal and devoted and so very wretched. Maybe she could’ve had what she deserved instead of a husband who was never by her side, a son whose life was taken from her before she could begin to care for him- before she knew that his liberty would be snatched from him just as hers was.

  I should have apologised. I still should apologise; somehow explain the way she was mercilessly thrown into a life full of such bitterness and sorrow. But I can’t. Because she is the first one to make me feel something, penetrate the veil of ice that has darkened forever my heart. Because she’s the only one to make me regret the dark path I started on long ago and regret is a dangerous thing, because this path has no turning back and it begets hope which destroys a blackened mind like fists through glass and already my soul is splintering.

  The child’s murmurs echo in mocking serenity when I hold him in my arms for the first time, innocence yet untainted despite my poisoned blood bred and pulsing desperately through his veins. It is then that my own father’s lessons surface in me and I almost tremble with the immaculate desolation because just as I have forsaken the opportunity to care, I have also forsaken all that I am, all that I was taught. Subjugation is not power, no matter how many riches I might possess, no matter how many I might command, no matter the beautiful misery Narcissa might swallow each day. It may be too late for me. It may be too late for her. But it may not be too late for my legacy.

  I raise him to be stronger than I am, to hide emotion behind a mask. I teach him that vulnerability is weakness and that weakness is intolerable. I love him with cruelty instead of tenderness. But I do not succeed in crushing his humanity because there is too much of her in him to ever be like me. And that is his saving grace.

  I fear that he comes to resent me and my power over others, the terrible things I do to preserve what little I can. Perhaps he will follow in my footsteps despite my fraught attempts to prevent it. Perhaps he will face a worse fate. Perhaps he will escape the misery of it after all.

  I was taught to want beautiful things, but beauty shudders in my impassive wake and shatters against the lightest fingertip. Everything I touch crumbles, everything but one, and I will protect him in violence and in death, in betrayal and devastation. Some power cannot be obtained through wealth or through authority but only from the depths of human depravity, and my corruption runs so very deep. Beneath it all I still tremble, no longer in suffering or in my own perverse terror but drowning in an ocean of dread and faith that I have a final chance at redemption. No matter the colour of blood, man must fall and my master is man yet. Surely as the sky I deserve what he’s done to me, but maybe I can save a little humanity after all.


End file.
